_Huckleberry Finn_, in its art, for one thing, and also in its broader range, is superior to _Tom Sawyer_ and to _Pudd’nhead Wilson_, fine as both these are in their several ways. In no book in our language, to my mind, has the boy, simply as a boy, been better realized than in _Tom Sawyer_. In some respects _Pudd’nhead Wilson_ is the most dramatic of Mark Twain’s longer stories, and also the most ingenious; like _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_, it has the full flavor of the Mississippi River, on which its author spent his own boyhood, and from contact with the soil of which he always rises reinvigorated. It is by these three stories, and especially by _Huckleberry Finn_, that Mark Twain is likely to live longest. Nowhere else is the life of the Mississippi Valley so truthfully recorded. Nowhere else can we find a gallery of Southwestern characters as varied and as veracious as those Huck Finn met in his wanderings. The histories of literature all praise the _Gil Blas_ of Le Sage for its amusing adventures, its natural characters, its pleasant humor, and its insight into human frailty; and the praise is deserved. But in everyone of these qualities _Huckleberry Finn_ is superior to _Gil Blas_. Le Sage set the model of the picaresque novel, and Mark Twain followed his example; but the American book is richer than the French--deeper, finer, stronger. It would be hard to find in any language better specimens of pure narrative, better examples of the power of telling a story and of calling up action so that the reader cannot help but see it, than Mark Twain’s account of the Shepherdson-Grangerford feud, and his description of the shooting of Boggs by Sherburn and of the foiled attempt to lynch Sherburn afterward. These scenes, fine as they are, vivid, powerful, and most artistic in their restraint, can be matched in the two other books. In _Tom Sawyer_ they can be paralleled by the chapter in which the boy and the girl are lost in the cave, and Tom, seeing a gleam of light in the distance, discovers that it is a candle carried by Indian Joe, the one enemy he has in the world. In _Pudd’nhead Wilson_ the great passages of _Huckleberry Finn_ are rivaled by that most pathetic account of the weak son willing to sell his own mother as a slave “down the river.” Although no one of the books is sustained throughout on this high level, and although, in truth, there are in each of them passages here and there that we could wish away (because they are not worthy of the association in which we find them), I have no hesitation in expressing here my own conviction that the man who has given us four scenes like these is to be compared with the masters of literature; and that he can abide the comparison with equanimity. IV